Just read Grow Your Business: 10 Outrageous Customer Services Ideas for Kick Ass Friday, a great post by my neighbor here in Lake Wylie, Russell White, on his Grow Your Business Blog. Russell talked about ten very simple and cheap things that virtually any business can implement that will excel their customer service through the roof. Many of these items appear to be common sense, but are they? I go into businesses every day that are hardly doing any of these things? Look at your business. If you are not doing some of these things, you should ask yourself, why not? In most cases, Customer Service is about the little things that are often overlooked – not the expensive things that you can’t afford.

A few more little fixes you can add to Russell’s list:

Don’t allow employees to huddle outside around the front door and smoke. As Larry Winget says, your front door is the opening to the “cathedral” of customer service. It is not a smoke hole. If your employees must smoke, send them around back. Better yet, ditch the smoking altogether. Few customers want to get the waiter that smells like he just smoked a pack.

Is your parking lot full of litter? Are weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalk or parking lot? Does your building look clean and well kept or is the paint faded and chipping away? Are letters burned out on your signage? If you don’t keep up the appearance of your building, it looks bad on you. Why would a customer think you would care about providing them with great service if you can’t even manage to shoot a little RoundUp (weed killer) on the weeds in the parking lot and put a fresh coat of paint on every few years?

Ditch Bad Employees! Bad employees hurt your customer service across the board. They are obviously bad with customers, but there bad habits and attitudes are like a bad virus that spreads throughout your Company and will turn other employees bad too. Everyone is replaceable (yes, everyone – even that guy you are thinking right now is not replaceable – he is too), especially in today’s business climate. If someone is letting their attitude get in the way of stellar customer services, find someone with a better attitude.

Can you think of any others?

No, I am not talking about Johnny Carson. Or even that character “Little Johnny” who is always in the “dirty jokes.” I am talking about Johnny the Bagger.

A collegue of mine forwarded me this video. He required all of his employees to watch it, and I do not think it is a bad idea for everyone to watch. I was pleased when I opened it to see that Ken Blanchard, one of my favorite authors, was credited on the first slide.

I hope you enjoy. It goes to show that thinking outside the box can truly make a difference when it comes to servicing our customers. Especially the “thinking” part – most of us stop trying to think of new ways to make customers feel special.

I hope you enjoy: Johnny the Bagger

This is more of a short rant than a blog post, but why do restaurants (mostly fast food) insist that they have a medium and a large drink size if there is not small. The medium simply can not exist unless there is at least one drink smaller than it and one drink larger than it. Otherwise, what are you measuring it against.

I first notice this marketing lie years ago at Steak and Shake. It was about 2am in the morning and we had been at the hospital most of the night as my wife had been ill. We pulled in and the extremely hateful lady on the other end of the microphone informed me that they did not have a small milkshake. Only a medium and a large. First off, why would she bother to tell me this. Should she not assume that I want the smallest milk shake they have? Secondly, why do they outright lie and state that the milkshake is their medium when it is obviously their small.

This was brought back into the forefront of my mind last night at Chick-Fil-A. Same scenario – only one size of milk shake – yet the girl called it a medium. If their is only one size, it really is just a milkshake. It isn’t a small, medium, or large.

Examine the pricing and marketing in your business. Do you have any of these little annoyances that can bother potential customers? Of course, at Steak and Shake the extremely hateful and rude employee on the other end that acted as if I was an idiot for ordering a small was much worse than the actual lie about the size.

Seth Godin wrote a great post about his terrible experience with Verizon during his current move. To those unfamiliar with Seth Godin, he is a bestselling author of many business and marketing books, including Meatball Sundae, The Purple Cow, and most recently, The Dip. Apparantly (to no surprise), Verizon’s customer service sucks. I find that this is not just the case with Verizon (or other large phone companies) but also with many large companies, especially banks.

Why is it that these companies have such large marketing budgets yet seem to cut corners and try to make the expense of servicing their exisiting customers so small? It is apparant that many of these companies are viewing the cost of servicing these customers as an expense – not as an investment.

If they did not view these cost as expenses, why would they farm my call out to someone in India who speaks broken English, can not understand my request, and does not have any authority to do anything about it when they do? The fact is that many of these large companies are viewing the cost of customer service as an expense and are trying to reduce it to fatten the bottom line. What ends up happening is that customers do not get the exceptional service that they deserve, and quite often go elsewhere?

An example of this is banking. I do the majority of all of my banking at Clover Community Bank. It is a small local bank that can do 95% of the stuff that a big national bank can and offers fantastic customer service. The tellers and managers actually know who you are when you go into the bank. You are not just another person that needs to be serviced. They seem to get it. They are making an investment in my customer service experience – and are a big reason I am so loyal to them. Why would I go elsewhere?

If you own a small business, how do you treat customer service? Investment or expense? Do you invest enough in your employees to make sure that they are providing spectacular service? This can obviously relate to the wages that you are paying them, but also the training and the tools they use to service your customers.

If you have a plumbing business, how do you customers get in touch with you? What happens during “off” hours? I know several times I have needed plumbers in the past, and been unable to get a machine to leave me a message. I even got a hateful sounding woman one time that told me I would have to call back because he wasn’t there. Why is he spending money in the Yellow Pages if he has no acceptable means to receive the calls when they come in.

I recall an upholstery shop nearby that I attempted to call for days on end – no one answered and there was no machine. This was odd considering their advertisements were all over the place advertising the phone number. While an answering machine may not be the optimum device to use to achieve spectacular service, it would have been a major improvement for this company.

My point is that from a small business perspective, there are often many little and inexpensive things that we can do to dramatically increase the level of service our customers receive. Let me know your thoughts or examples of how small businesses may be improved.